The warm-up window
An audit is only as good as the data behind it, so Surfais waits until your brand has built up real scan history before offering the first one: at least 14 days of completed scan coverage, measured from your earliest completed scan rather than the day you signed up, before the Run new audit button unlocks. If you’re inside that window, the Audits page shows a card explaining your first audit is warming up, with the exact unlock date. There’s nothing to do except keep scanning as normal — the countdown runs automatically.Because the clock measures scan coverage rather than account age, a brand with scan history from before you started using audits can already have the window satisfied.
Allowances per plan
Every paid plan includes a regular audit allowance, built into your subscription:
Your allowance is enforced as a cadence — a minimum gap between audits for a given brand — rather than a balance that runs out at a fixed point in the month. Run within your plan’s cadence and it’s simply your scheduled audit; try to run again before the next one is due and Surfais tells you the date it becomes available, with the option to buy an extra one instead. See Extra audits & credits for exactly how that works.
Free trials include one complimentary audit, once the warm-up window has passed. The recurring allowance above applies once you’re on a paid plan.
Starting an audit
1
Open your brand's Audits page
Navigate to Audits from the sidebar for the brand you want to assess.
2
Check your brand profile is complete
Running an audit needs four fields set: industry, geography, business model, and scale — what the category-viability filtering runs on. If any are missing, Run new audit is disabled with a link straight to fill them in.
3
Click Run new audit
Past the warm-up window, within your allowance, with a complete profile — the button starts the audit and takes you to its detail page.
4
Wait for it to finish
A typical audit takes up to 5 minutes. Leave the page and come back to Audits later — the report is there once it’s ready.
Delivery: PDF and email
Every completed audit — not just the most recent — offers two ways to take it with you: Download PDF, a formatted export ready to share with a client, a developer, or your own team, and Email me this audit, which sends the same report to your account email.Framework versioning
Audits are generated against a versioned framework — the rules that define what each category checks, how recommendations are filtered, and how the report is structured. Each audit is permanently pinned to the framework version it ran under at the time, shown on its detail page. When the framework is updated, only new audits use the new version — past audits never change retroactively, so a report you downloaded last month always matches what you see if you open it again today.Related pages
What audits check
The six scoring categories and how recommendations are filtered.
Reading your audit
A section-by-section walk through the report.
Extra audits & credits
Buying an audit outside your plan’s allowance.
Plans & limits
Full detail on what each plan includes.